When I talked with my Lean Six Sigma friend Mike Negami on phone about the typical topic “Why is Lean Six Sigma unpopular in Japan”, he said that the Lean Six Sigma is getting more popular as the next step of quality improvement after the ISO 9001 certification.
Continue reading “Essay: ISO and Six Sigma”Case Study: Initiate Certification Project
Many new projects for Lean Six Sigma and DFSS certification (Green Belt and Black Belt) start in October and November every year because the beginning of the fiscal year starts in October, and employees set up a new goal for the fiscal year. Obtaining the Lean Six Sigma or DFSS certification is one of their goal.
Continue reading “Case Study: Initiate Certification Project”Case Study: Attribute Agreement Analysis
As a part of MSA (Measurement System Analysis), we analyze repeatability and reproducibility of a measurement system in a Lean Six Sigma project. It’s called Gage R&R. The Gage R&R can be categorized into two types – Continuous Gage R&R and Attribute Gage R&R.
Continue reading “Case Study: Attribute Agreement Analysis”Case Study: Root Cause Analysis with Parameter Diagram
I had a chance to help the technical support group yesterday and attended a meeting for troubleshooting. The meeting discussed a game plan for investing the problems and finding the root causes of the problems to solve. We used the parameter-diagram in the meeting because the problems and the root-causes were complicatedly interconnected.
Continue reading “Case Study: Root Cause Analysis with Parameter Diagram”Case Study: DOE for Soldering
I was asked by a black belt yesterday, who was in charge of a continuous improvement project for a factory in Dominican Republic. According to him, there seemed to be a problem in the soldering process which caused the solder bridges. He wanted to preform DOE to identify a main factor of the defect, and he already created a plan for the DOE.
Continue reading “Case Study: DOE for Soldering”Case Study: Effect of Design FMEA
Conducting a meeting with some engineers to a Design FMEA is pretty hard because the engineers are always busy. Gathering several engineers and conducting a long hour meeting not only makes a pressure on the project schedule but put an additional burden on the engineers. Even worse, the Design FMEA meeting does not create a tangible design elements. But the manager and the engineer could be relieved from the burden if they understand a positive effect of Design FMEA.
Continue reading “Case Study: Effect of Design FMEA”Essay: Lean Six Sigma (DMAIC) Approach
I have recently worked with the engineers in QA (Quality and Assurance) team. They have been investigating the products returned from our customers because of a problem, and tried to find the root-causes of the problem. But the returned products have never shown the problem complained by the customers even with thorough tests. We call such returned products as NPF (No-problem found).
Continue reading “Essay: Lean Six Sigma (DMAIC) Approach”Essay: V-Model and QFD
The V-Model framework is very common in product development to associate the documents between the product requirement document, the function requirement document, design specification, the test specification, etc. It is called the V-Model because these documents are connected in V shape. The V-Model has a good compatibility with QFD (Quality Function Deployment) so the V-Model and the QFD are used together in a DFSS project.
Continue reading “Essay: V-Model and QFD”Essay: Simulation and DOE for Business Process
It is very common to use a flowchart or a VSM (Value Stream Map) for visualizing a business process, an operation process, or a manufacturing process. Not only both flowchart and VSM are very good visualization tool, but the flowchart can easily explain a loop, a branch and a merge in the process, and the VSM can easily explain the cycle-time and the waiting-time in the process. Both flowchart and VSM can be used for the process improvement.
Continue reading “Essay: Simulation and DOE for Business Process”Essay: Failure Mode in FMEA (2)
I had been thinking other failure modes in FMEA after posting the previous article. Then I found a good information in ASQ (American Society for Quality) regarding the FMEA. Based on the information and my experiences, I added some other failure modes and created a list of them..
Continue reading “Essay: Failure Mode in FMEA (2)”